and continual misery of broken efforts and aspirations, it has waited for the king's son to come. And now, after twenty-two hundred years, the king's son has come. But he has come in overalls and old clothes of the farm, and the heart of the world is slow indeed to recognize him and acknowledge his triumphant power. Just as the rabbis of Jerusalem were unable to recognize their Messiah in the carpenter of Nazareth who rode into their city on an ass, so the high priests of democracy and of "social science" cannot give their allegiance to the real savior of mankind, the revolutionary proletariat. They cannot divorce their idea of what is wise and fine from what is well-clothed and respectable. They are still bound by the habits of the old kind of aristocracy, and so they are powerless even to extend a hand of welcome to the new.
And yet, how obvious it seems to have been all along! A society in which one class of the people lives and finds leisure for "ideals," only because it exploits another class and deprives them of life, cannot possibly realize those of its ideals which are humane and just. To create a beautiful political thing out of the materials of human nature in such conditions, is utterly impossible. The most benevolent of reformers cannot even begin to do it, for they are destroyed and their effort is destroyed by the blind instinct of self-preservation in that upper class which holds the power of wealth. Even the philosopher-king, as Plato himself realized, would succeed only in becoming a martyr to this power that is behind all thrones. "And yet in the whole course of the ages," he said sadly, "perhaps a single one may be saved."
It was altogether impossible that a tyrant-philosopher should communize the world—and equally impossible that the tyrant class should be persuaded to relinquish its privilege little by little in behalf of a more ideal society—an impossible dream. Nature's force of self-interest is too strong. But it was not impossible that the members of the exploited class themselves, instead of trying each one individually to climb out into the tyrant class, should band themselves together to conquer the tyrant, abolish the system of exploitation altogether, and begin the building of an ideal republic. That was possible, because the self-interest of these classes when banded together happens to be in general accord with that impersonal wisdom which Plato attributed to the philosopher, and they happen through the evolu-
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